#which doesn't mean it's not radical! it is radical! but i don't think it's as gender-nonconformist as it seems to a modern eye.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Since you mentioned this in an earlier ask, what is your take on feminist Leona? I see people saying things like "consent king" "he drinks his respect women juice" and "leona kingscholar says men ain't shit" but I think those are mainly jokes but I've also seen a lot of for example Leona x reader fanfics where he's a lot nicer to femme Yuus than masc ones. I don't play the game so I don't know how much of a feminist he really is, could you clarify and give your own insights? Ty Miss Raven!!!!!!!

[Referencing this post!]

Admittedly, I am guilty of having made “consent king” jokes but that’s mainly because I think consent + respecting others’ autonomy is very sexy important and it’s slightly funny to have a 185 cm muscular anime cat boy championing the concept. However, I try to avoid making jokes which would imply Leona puts down his own gender or thinks lesser of them because 1) canon doesn't indicate this and 2) it can be hurtful to non-femme Twst fans. Yes, most of the fandom is women--but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make this fandom space welcoming for masculine or nonbinary Twst fans.

Let's delve into a brief history of where feminist!Leona comes from! After that, I'll discuss my own thoughts and feelings about it.

The idea first came into prominence because of an exchange that occurs in Cater's School Uniform vignette. In it, Cater is trying to convince Leona to join him for a party that he's throwing for Rosaria, one of the talking paintings at NRC. At first, Leona refuses--but he quickly changes his tune once Cater mentions Rosaria is a "she/her". Leona states, "Portrait or not, I respect ladies and Rosaria is a lady." Cater then whispers to Kalim (who is shocked that Leona suddenly agreed to come along), "Leona's kingdom is all about being respectful to ladies."

It should be noted that Leona says something slightly different in JP: “Even if it’s a portrait, a woman is a woman.” JP does not have the “I respect ladies” portion; “I respect ladies” was added to EN, which may have further amplified the interpretation that he is a feminist.

Now, as we learn from that vignette, the Sunset Savanna has a culture of "respecting women". In Leona's Ceremonial Robes vignette, he elaborates that, “[Beastwomen are] already way stronger than [beastmen]." Furthermore, Ruggie states in one of his Chats that “Girls have both the grit and the camaraderie to triumph when the goin’ gets tough.” Then, in events like Tamashina Mina and late in book 7, we are told that many of the royal guards are women who volunteer for the positions and it's common for them to have learned martial arts from a young age. From this dialogue, we can glean that the women of Leona's home country are physically strong, strong-willed, and honorable.

With that being said, I think certain interpretations of Leona's "feminism" (a term not actually used by official materials; this is a fandom take) definitely take it a step too far by either assuming Leona treats woman as a special class and/or he dislikes men. Both of those interpretations (if serious and not said as a joke) are owed to a fundamental misunderstanding of what "feminism" is. Feminism is "the belief in full social, economic, and political equality for women." Feminism is NOT misandry (a hatred of men), and nor is it female chauvinism (the belief that women are superior to men)... unless, of course, you're talking about very radicalized forms of thinking. The basic concept of feminism doesn't involve man hate or putting women on a pedestal.

Leona, whom we know to be arrogant and unwilling to obey others' orders, appears to be more willing to listen to and carry out tasks if there's a woman involved. I already mentioned the case with Rosaria the painting (which proves that his "respecting women" thing extends beyond just beastwomen from his home country). In his Ceremonial Robes, he also grumpily puts on the aforementioned robes and takes a picture of himself in it upon the request of his sister-in-law. But--and this should be stressed--he's not exactly jumping for joy or eager to do so. Instead, Leona cites that "Goin’ against [beastwomen] only brings more trouble.” This indicates annoyance at having to carry out this chore, and gives the impression that Leona's only complying because not doing so would only overcomplicate things for him. He's not an idiot--he knows when to make a strategic retreat if it's going to save him time and effort in the long run. (For example, he immediately surrenders to the Ferrymen in book 6 rather than continue to put up a fight.)

I should note that, like in the earlier definition of feminism I shared, Leona does not simply bend the knee to every single woman. In the first Halloween event, he was still capable of scaring off the Magicam Monsters (some of which have distinctly female voices) without any qualms. He was still fully able to express anger and upset when Eliza, the Ghost Bride, smacked him. "You've got a lot of nerve turnin' me down over some nonsense!" He's also not above tricking the Fairy Queen and her entourage to steal back the special magestone from NRC.

This shows us that Leona doesn't just... "respect women" indiscriminately. If someone is going to be rude and selfish to him, he's going to respond as is appropriate. He's not going to turn a blind eye because of the offending party's gender.

In terms of Yuu interactions (assuming Yuu can be any gender), Leona acts pretty aggressive towards them in their first meeting. Even though it's clearly an accident and Yuu didn't realize they stepped on his tail, Leona is annoyed by the act and them walking away without apologizing or stopping to acknowledge him. He also makes it known that Yuu is magicless, and thus has no way of defending themselves from him. And you know what this man does? He says, "Well, can't say it'd be much fun to hurt someone so helpless. Still gonna do it, though." AND HE THREATENS TO TAKE A TOOTH. His wording, "No one gets to stomp on my tail and just walk away without payin' the price" + him still deciding to attack Yuu desite knowing they are weak/cannot fight back, implies to me that he may have still reacted this way regardless of Yuu's gender. (Key word: MAY. We don't know if this is the truth or not, I am leaving this up to your interpretation.)

Notably, there is a light change between EN and JP versions for Yuu's dialogue choices in response to Leona's threat. The EN dialogue options are far more humorous, but the JP options clearly convey fear (ie Leona is being serious about his threat of bodily harm). The top option is like noises of surprise, like "Eh, eh, eh!!"; the bottom option is along the lines of, "What, I'm going to be hit/beaten!"

There are, in fact, multiple instances where Leona acts callous towards Yuu. He refuses to let Yuu stay in Savanaclaw unless they earn their keep by beating up some mobs. He constantly degrades them by calling them and others he considers weak "herbivore". He has to be goaded into helping us or taking us along on trips instead of automatically caving. It could be argued that he would be more agreeable or polite if fem!Yuu was in these scenarios. And who knows, that might be the case--but again, I don't think he would be egregiously kind. I would like to point out a more direct example of a Leona-fem!Yuu interaction. Leona has interacted with a female Yuu before: Yuuka Hirasaka, our main character for the Episode of Savanaclaw manga. There's some debate over whether or not the NRC students know that Yuuka is a girl since the topic is never mentioned once, but I assume that they are aware because: 1) Yuuka makes no effort to hide her figure or chest; she even wears her blazer open, and 2) she has no motivation to hide her gender; she is capable of defending herself if needed and has a nonchalant personality. Proceeding with the assumption that Yuuka being a girl is a known fact, Leona does not treat her any differently than any other student.

Yuuka seems to experience the same tail-stepping scene as is depicted in game, although we don't see the aftermath of it/if Leona gives her the same threat.

The more telling scene for Yuuka, however, comes when she and her friends arrive in Savanaclaw to investigate. They are confronted by a bunch of mobs that start to pick a fight with them. Like in the game, Leona intervenes (ie he doesn't stop the fight just because Yuuka is a woman) and has them duke it out in a game of spelldrive/magift instead.

And you know what? Leona doesn't hold back just because he's playing against a woman. In fact, he kicks Yuuka's ass and then some. Then he stands over her and tells her to get back up, to keep playing. Leona isn't cutting Yuuka any slack whatsoever. He treats Yuuka the same as the boys she's playing with.

This brings me to my final prominent example of Leona interacting with a woman, which I think best exemplifies what my interpretation of Leona's "feminism" is. In the JP server's 2024 Halloween event Lost in the Book with Nightmare Before Christmas, Sally indicates that she plans on making a meal using the plants from around the cemetery. Leona is at first displeased by this, but then agrees to help her catch snakes, rats, lizards, etc. as meat for the meal. This leads into a conversation about how sad Sally's home life is, which earns her sympathy from the other NRC students. Jade, Riddle, and Epel are shocked at the cruelty that Sally faces. Jade volunteers to take the doctor out for Sally, and Epel even tries to convince Leona to help him rough up Dr. Finkelstein. But Leona just smirks and tells them Sally's not in any need of their "help"; isn't she the one who slipped the doctor a "drink"? Riddle scolds him for this "ungentlemanly" behavior and Epel refuses to believe that the "kind Sally" would do something like use poison. Leona was able to smell the deadly nightshade on her and deduce that Sally slipped some to her guardian and then slipped out on her own. She's not a damsel in distress--she's resourceful. Sally used her brains and not brute force to rescue herself from a bad situation. (We know that this would deeply resonate with Leona because he has been struggling his entire life to have his own merits recognized.) Leona praises Sally for her cunning and goes so far as to offer her his arm and tell her that he's looking forward to this evening's dinner.

In this situation, could it not be said that Jade, Riddle, and Epel were the ones assuming Sally is weak that Leona was the one who saw her true worth? I'm of course not accusing anyone here of being sexist. Society socializes us to see women as the "fairer sex" in need of protection and aid--but isn't Leona being more equitable by not underestimating Sally because of her gender?

That brings me to my conclusion. Leona respects women, no doubt about that. However, that's NOT a blanket statement. He clearly knows how to separate who is worthy of his respect and who isn't, and then he acts accordingly. Yes, he is polite, slightly softer, and more willing to listen to women he knows (his sister-in-law), women who haven't offended him/are just existing (Rosaria), and woman who have demonstrated their own strengths to him (Sally). He doesn’t become a completely different character just to bend to the whims of women. Those who have acted in ways to earn his ire, woman or not, will be treated as such (Magicam Monsters, Eliza, even Yuu when they/she enters his territory and/or steps on his tail). At the same time, I don't believe he thinks that women are delicate flowers that need special treatment (as we see with how he handles Sally + the Yuus and, more specifically, Yuuka). If anything, the women from his home country have demonstrated that they can be strong and self-sufficient. Why would he feel the need to go out of his way to be extremely lenient with the women he is around?

Lastly, nothing in official materials implies Leona treats men significantly worse than women. If he seems exceedingly rude to men, it’s most likely the result of the main cast (the characters Leona most often interacts with) being guys. If we were to compare how he treats his peers and how he treats women who have irritated him, I would say the behavior isn’t that different.

I know that was a long post but 😅 Hopefully I was able to articulate my thoughts well enough… May you find it helpful in forming your own opinion, Anon!

[low-budget-korra]

Activism for likes

Okay, let's talk about something serious that thankfully I don't see here but in other social media is everywhere : Activism of likes.

That's when I truly feel my age because every time I see a - 25 having the same Ctrl c Ctrl v arguments, being hypocrite, only seeing things as black and white and playing white saviour...I lose a bit of faith in the future.

In Avatar fandom, an older show, I don't see much of this but in Arcane... People thinking they are doing woke comments when in reality they are just exposing themselves as someone who didn't even watch the show.

Ekko forgives Jinx , who quite literally killed his buddies and was his enemy for years. He also befriends Heimerdinger, a 200+ council member who never did anything for Zaun. Why do some people fully believe that he wouldn't forgive Vi for becoming an enforcer for a brief time? Just bc y'all don't understand her reasons to do it, doesn't mean he also wouldn't. He would be disappointed (as he should) but he would understand and forgive.

They also give Jinx a pass just because she is poor. And I say this bc when a rich girl (Caitlyn) does the same shit, she is fully hated. Talk about projecting your world frustrations in a fantasy world right... And again, you should disagree with Caitlyn radical action bc they were bad, but pretend that she didn't have a solid reason to do so or even ignore the fact that she was also manipulated, is just dishonest and hypocrite. I don't know y'all, but I would not care if Jinx also had reasons to blow up the council but if my mom died there, I would do the same as Caitlyn (and, you probably would too, if you have a good relationship with your mom. Don't play the all righteous here.)

And it gets me because if ppl are unable to understand that a fantasy world such as Arcane, where as viewers see both sides of the wall. Imagine they trying to talk about real world problems, which is a lot more complicated and nuanced.

Activism is only "true" when it has substance, when it has argument, when the person behind study stuff and it's always trying to learn more and more. It's when they can hold a discussion without insulting the other person.

(yes, I understand that there's radical activism but even for these. People need to study or else it will be violence for the sake of it and the bigger enemy will destroy it)

Be unable to hold a discussion with people who think differently, oversimplifying the world and seeing everything as black and white is conservative agenda and not activism

[the-busy-ghost]

Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class. 

Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules. 

But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point. 

I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009. 

But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end? 

Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:

And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out

[musical-chick-13]

Genuinely I cannot take the phrase "de-centering men" seriously anymore.

[mangled-by-disuse]

Tried to put this in the replies, but it got long and is relevant to the OP, so:

Less so than the average British/South African white guy of his time, which is to say: yes, but not notably so.

He did also speak very bluntly in his response to the Nazi requests to translate his work, claiming he would have been proud to be a genuine Aryan [that is, from the Indian subcontinent] but unfortunately he's just German and English. Some of that is "Oxford fellow thinks he's being very smart" rhetorical devices, but he also does seem to have been pretty vocally of the belief that different cultures and ethnicities held value, and while he left South Africa very young and considered himself English, he did also remark on the brutality and inhumanity of the apartheid regime there. He also criticised C.S. Lewis' assertion (in The Last Battle) that some people couldn't get into heaven on the basis of race and culture, but "have a theological argument with C.S. Lewis" does seem to have been one of his primary hobbies at the time so idk if that was purely anti-racist.

At the same time: this was at a time when the N-word was in common parlance (including in children's nursery rhymes and even in leftist discourse), when Britain had an empire and Tolkien had been raised in one of its colonies, and when the school system emphasised "the white man's burden" and the savagery and primitivism of "lesser" cultures. And Tolkien was not a radical, and not sufficiently concerned with race as a topic to break fully from that social conditioning. So it's not like he wasn't a racist, but he wasn't a racist by the standards of his time, background, and immediate environment. (Bearing in mind that his immediate environment was the same one that saw the rise of Oswald Mosley and Winston Churchill.)

What Tolkien WAS was a genuine, old-school British conservative, which I think is what right-wingers pick up on in his work. He had an engrained belief in hierarchy and traditionalism, and his arguments against capitalism come from Catholic semi-feudalism, not socialism. "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly and each to his estate" is very much an underpinning of a lot of Tolkien's work, which emphasises the importance of working to, and being satisfied with, your status in life - Sam's strength is his humility and desire to be a simple gardener, but, while humility remains valuable throughout, Aragorn's strength is that he knows that he is born to be King. Ruling is all he can ever ethically do (noticeably, whether or not his people consent to be ruled - note that the first Man of Gondor he comes into contact with is Boromir, whose response of "ok mate where the fuck have you been when we were fighting and dying for the past forty years?", and that is cast as a mistake on Boromir's part, and he is told to sit down and respect the rightful king by Literal Voice Of The Gods Gandalf), and it would be wrong and evil for him to try to do anything else, just as it would be a moral wrong for Sam to try to be a king.

Lord of the Rings in particular is very concerned with noblesse oblige and the burdens of power - while, yes, the core story is "minor gentry [Sam is the only actual working-class character] rises above his presumed station and, through being literally and metaphorically one of the little people of the world, slips under the radar and completes a heroic quest", almost all the surrounding stories are about the difficult duty of managing power. And, unfortunately, this lends itself very readily to a "white man's burden" kind of reading - these people, you see, are simply of superior race (literally, in the case of the Elves, and in the case of Aragorn, Boromir, and the ruling class of Gondor being measured by their proximity to Númenorean bloodlines), and so it is their unfortunate duty to command and to cleanse the lesser (Orcish, and by extension Easterling and Haradrim) races from their nice, functional societies.

To be clear: I do not think this is how Tolkien intended it. I think, in his own traditionalist, cloistered-academic, Catholic way, he was pretty egalitarian. He doesn't treat the ruling class as actually better than the working class - Sam is no less a hero than Frodo, Merry, and Pippin, all of whom are gentry or nobility, and none of them are lesser as people than Aragorn or Elrond or even Gandalf or Galadriel - even if he does view class distinctions as fundamental and immutable differences. He values friendship, peace, and the laying down of grudges (against all the problems caused by revenge, note that Éomer's first and most noble act of kingship is "accepting the Dunlendings' surrender, treating them kindly, and making peace with them", and they are so impressed by this that they too put aside a centuries-long war and help rebuild the country they helped to destroy). While he often forgets that women exist (I will die on the hill that "three out of 22 rulers of Númenor were women, despite equal inheritance being explicit" is evidence that Tolkien just did not think of women as being half the population), he is quick to defend their value in both masculine and feminine pursuits, and to express them as people outside of marriage and childbearing - and his own life, in which he married a much older divorcée from a different religious background against all voices from their families, reflects that same sense of valuing women on human terms. He is a humanist, not in the religious sense but in the sense that he values humanity above all things in his writing; he writes consistently against power for its own sake, against war as glory, and against bigotry and condemnation.

BUT

he was also a traditional, dyed-in-the-wool Tory, Catholic-restorationist, pro-feudal Oxford don who was raised in a much more conservative time, place, and social class than most of us, and he brings that to his writing too. From a conservative perspective, reading with an eye for right-wing ideas:

Éowyn ultimately turns from the aberration of being a warrior and becomes a wife and mother, embracing "feminine" traits of healing and caring as part of her own healing.

Class is reified through Sam's heroism being that of a servant, and Aragorn's that of a king, and the return of the king is the source of great rejoicing.

Some races, and some classes, are simply better at things. Dwarves are better craftsmen. Men are better warriors. Elves are better at everything because they're special. they are also tall and fair and European

The idyllic Shire is a cottagecore dream of traditional British rural life, in which people know their place, women are real women, and everyone has good manners.

Most of the "good" societies are coded with European or Classical trappings (the exception is actually Gondor, which is pretty easily read as Byzantine), and opposed against a literal rampaging horde from the East. Some of the horde from the East are literally inhuman, while others are elephant-riding brutes who hold oblique historical grudges and strange religious customs. Compassion against these foreign invaders is looked upon favourably by the narrative, but only after you've killed them.

With the previous point, and the films, in mind, it is easy to conclude that regardless of species diversity, the Fellowship is a cadre of brave white men fighting to protect their society from a monstrous foreign threat - one in which a cunning trickster from within the main setting has puppeted the less evolved races into destroying Western civilisation.

While the story is anti-war, it is anti-war in a way that allows for cool battle scenes and noble deaths, and there are several points at which Dying For A Cause is lionised and seen as redemptive in a way that slots nicely into a lot of more militaristic ideologies (including fascism).

again, I cannot underline enough, I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS IS A FAIR READING OF THE NARRATIVE. I think it's an ideologically-motivated reading that ignores both Tolkien's personal views and large chunks of the text. But the thing is: the people who read it in the way I've described would probably say the same thing of your description.

The thing about Tolkien's much-discussed distaste for intentional allegory is: Lord of the Rings is not 1984. It is not an explicit political polemic. It is one man unpacking his Great War trauma and political anxieties, his expertise in Anglo-Saxon literature, his special interests in folklore and etymology, his love of the English countryside and his dislike of modernity, his Catholicism and his conservatism and his egalitarianism and his loneliness and his loves. It is not absolute in its politics, because it isn't trying to give you a political solution: it's trying to give you morals, yes, but they're as much personal ones as societal ones.

It is not a shock that right-wingers latch onto Tolkien's work, or see parts of their beliefs reflected there. It's still a fucking insult to the work, but it's not a shock.

Seeing conservatives and bigots being fans of Tolkien works is a special type of jumpscare bcs what are you doing here man? In the franchise about folks from different backgrounds and races come together in brotherhood to vanquish the villain? Where kindness and compassion and sinple happiness were seen as the best ways to keep evil at bay? Where war is not glorified and seen as a grim necessity to the point where the son of the author gor criticised the movies for glorifying the war too much? Where men openly engaged in feminine activities and were open about emotions other than anger? Where multiple characters gender presentation varied from those we normally associate with their gender? Where women were empowered in multiple different ways? Where greed was presented as turning one into a literal monster?Where the villains are all thinly veiled depictions of capitalism? Where care for the enviornment is seen as a given?

[medicinemane]

Make Puerto Rico a state already, don't like having second class Americans, and that's how I'd describe it when they're out there paying taxes, contributing to the good of the country, but they don't even get representation via things like a senator

Like I'm sat here thinking about it and... do Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico even get to vote for president? Cause... that's never listed in the electoral college vote count, so I'm gonna guess no

Seem to remember hearing somewhere something about "no taxation without representation", sounded pretty good I thought

Make Puerto Rico a state, make them a state. Every year I get more and more pissed off as I think about how fellow Americans are treated like this. I'm extremely pro Puerto Rico, they're clearly a part of the union... you either make them a state or make them their own country, you don't keep people trapped in this limbo state where they've got less rights than I do

[psychoticallytrans]

I do wish that "oppositional sexism" was a more commonly known term. It was coined as part of transmisogyny theory, and is defined as the belief that men and women, are distinct, non-overlapping categories that do not share any traits. If gender was a venn diagram, people who believe in oppositional sexism think that "men" and "women" are separate circles that never touch.

The reason I think that it's a useful term is that it helps a lot with articulating exactly why a lot of transphobic people will call a cis man a girl for wearing nail polish, then turn around and call a trans woman a man. Both of those are enforcement of man and woman as non-overlapping social categories. It's also a huge part of homophobia, with many homophobes considering gay people to no longer really belong to their gender because they aren't performing it to their satisfaction.

It's a large part of the reason behind arguments that men and women can't understand each other or be friends, and/or that either men or women are monoliths. If men and women have nothing in common at all, it would be difficult for them to understand each other, and if all men are alike or all women are alike, then it makes sense to treat them all the same. Enforcing this rift is particularly miserable for women and men in close relationships with each other, but is often continued on the basis that "If I'm not a real man/woman, they won't love me anymore."

One common "progressive" form of oppositional sexism is an idea often put as the "divine feminine", that women are special in a way that men will never understand. It's meant to uplift women, but does so in ways that reinforce the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that can never be reconciled or transcended. There's a reason this rhetoric is hugely popular among both tradwifes and radical feminists. It argues that there is something about women that men will never have or know, which is appealing when you are trying to define womanhood in a way that means no man is or ever has been a part of it.

You'll notice that nonbinary people are sharply excluded from the definition. This doesn't mean it doesn't apply to them, it means that oppositional sexism doesn't believe nonbinary people of any kind exist. It's especially rough on multigender people who are both men and women, because the whole idea of it is that men and women are two circles that don't overlap. The idea of them overlapping in one person is fundamentally rejected.

I think it's a very useful term for talking about a lot of the problems that a lot of queer people face when it comes to trying to carve out a place for ourselves in a society that views any deviation from rigid, binary categories as a failure to perform them correctly.

[autogyne-redacted]

Let's Talk About Security Culture: Why Keeping Secrets is Cool and Sexy

It's a natural impulse -- if you love crime -- to want to talk about how great it is. And if you hate America, it's only natural to want to share your dreams for its future with the rest of tumblr dot com. It can feel brave and transgressive. And there is a drive to share your soul with the world at the heart of social media. Surely I should be posting the most concrete implications of my politics, right? This is the poster's curse.

Security Culture refers to a set of "best practices" developed over the past several decades, largely (in a US context) coming out of radical environmental groups as they faced intense state repression, infiltration and entrapment. If you're not familiar, there's some fascinating crimethinc write ups to give you a window into that world:

Much of it boils down to: don't talk about crimes, past or forthcoming with people who don't need to know about them, and be mindful of the possibility of surveillance and infiltration. And, we can support each other as a community in minimizing risks, with an eye towards enabling bold action rather than getting bogged down in fears and anxieties. The guidelines that make sense for AG-based trouble-makers are different from the guidelines that make sense for posters, but plenty of common principles apply. To speak briefly to our position here as posters:

First, it bears saying that long term anonymity is nearly impossible to maintain. Unless you've never accessed Tumblr without a vpn, and avoided connections with other ppl who can be associated with you/your location, and never shared pictures without scrubbing metadata, and a bunch of other 100% consistent steps, it's trivial for the state to know who you are.

Second, just because something isn't actively being prosecuted now doesn't mean it can't be prosecuted later. The priorities of the state change and a shift in power towards the right or a growth in radical action from the left can suddenly make it a priority to destroy anarchist networks or just find a few ppl to prosecute as examples (who probably weren't that plugged into larger networks before getting arrested). Advocating for specific anti-government crimes or declarations of intent to commit such crimes are likely prosecutable, and even if charges don't stick, they're an easy vector for legal harassment.

Third, it's worth thinking about heat as separate from prosecutability. There are modes of engagement that may not be directly criminalized but signal that you are someone worth watching. Some people choose to be public in ways that make heat unavoidable. But it's worth noting that heat isn't strictly individualized, that it persists over time but also is going to shrink over time.

It's easy on here, ime, to see yourself as a proud member of the crime fandom but not much of a content creator. And it's easy to feel like you've generated an amount of heat where you're locked into that role. But heat you generated 10 years ago is probably pretty well gone. Heat you generated 5 years ago has faded substantially. It's worth thinking about how the world might shift in the coming years and what doors you want to keep open.

The non-individualized nature of heat also means that leaning into the spiciest of anti-state positions will make it a bad idea for people who are acting out those positions end up tied to you. Loudly talking about how "more people should be doing [X/Y/Z]" unfortunately sets you up to remain distant from people who might be doing or thinking about doing such things.

Which brings me back to: keeping secrets is sexy. Not spelling everything out builds intrigue. You can lay out a theoretical position and leave working out the practical implications of that as an exercise for the reader. There's value in opacity. The poster's curse and the drive to confess are extremely convenient for the state, but we can resist them. We can hold dreams in our hearts that we refuse to offer up to the posting spectacle.

[fuckyeahisawthat]

There are so many places in the Villeneuve Dune adaptations where he just...takes all the narrative pieces that Frank Herbert laid out and subtly rearranges them into something that tells the story better--that creates dramatic tension where you need it, communicates the themes and message of the book more clearly, or corrects something in the text that contradicts or undermines what Herbert said he was trying to say.

The fedaykin are probably my favorite example of this. I just re-read a little part of the book and got smacked in the face with how different they are.

(under the cut for book spoilers and length)

The fedaykin in the book are Paul's personal followers, sort of his personal guard. They show up after his legend has already started growing (the word doesn't appear in the book until chapter 40) and they are people who have specifically dedicated themselves to fighting for him, and right from the moment they're introduced there is a kind of implied fanaticism to their militancy that's a bit uncomfortable to read. They're the most ardent believers in Paul's messianic status and willing to die for him. (They are also, as far as you can tell from the text, all men.)

In the book, as far as I can remember (I could be forgetting some small detail but I don't think so) there is no mention of armed resistance to colonialism on Arrakis before Paul shows up. As far as we know, he created it. ETA: Okay I actually went back and checked on this and while we hear about the Fremen being "a thorn in the side" of the Harkonnens and we know that they are good fighters, we don't see anything other than possibly one bit of industrial sabotage. The book is very clear that the organized military force we see in the second half was armed and trained by Paul. This is exacerbated by the two-year time jump in the book, which means we never see how Paul goes from being a newly deposed ex-colonial overlord running for his life to someone who has his own private militia of people ready to give their lives for him.

The movie completely flips all these dynamics on their head in ways that add up to a radical change in meaning.

The fedaykin in the movie are an already-existing guerrilla resistance movement on Arrakis that formed long before Paul showed up. Literally the first thing we learn about the Fremen, less that two minutes into the first movie, is that they are fighting back against the colonization and exploitation of their home and have been for decades.

The movie fedaykin also start out being the most skeptical of the prophecy about Paul, which is a great choice from both a political and a character standpoint. Of course they're skeptical. If you're part of a small guerrilla force repeatedly going up against a much bigger and stronger imperial army...you have to believe in your own agency. You have to believe that it is possible to win, and that this tiny little chip in the armor of a giant terrifying military machine that you are making right now will make a difference in the end. These are the people who are directly on the front lines of resisting oppression. They are doing it with their own sweat, blood and ingenuity, and they are not about to wait around for some messiah who may never come.

From a character standpoint, this is really the best possible environment you could put Paul Atreides in if you want to keep him humble. He doesn't get any automatic respect handed to him due to title or birthright or religious belief. He has to prove himself--not as any kind of savior but as a good fighter and a reliable member of a collective political project. And he does. This is an environment that really draws out his best qualities. He's a skilled fighter; he's brave (sometimes recklessly so); he's intensely loyal to and protective of people he cares about. He is not too proud to learn from others and work hard in an egalitarian environment where he gets no special treatment or extra glory. The longer he spends with the fedaykin the more his allegiance shifts from Atreides to Fremen, and the more skeptical he himself becomes about the prophecy. This sets up the conflict with Jessica, which comes to a head before she leaves for the south. And his political sincerity--that he genuinely comes to believe that these people deserve liberation from all colonial forces and his only role should be to help where he can--is what makes the tragedy work. Because in the end we know he will betray all these values and become the exact thing he said he didn't want to be.

There's another layer of meaning to all this that I don't know if the filmmakers were even aware of. ETA: rescinding my doubt cause based on some of Villeneuve's other projects I'm pretty sure he could work it out. Given the time period (1960s) and Herbert's propensity for using Arabic or Arabic-inspired words for aspects of Fremen culture, it seems very likely that the made-up word fedaykin was taken from fedayeen, a real Arabic word that was frequently used untranslated in American news media at the time, usually to refer to Palestinian armed resistance groups.

Fedayeen is usually translated into English as fighter, guerrilla, militant or something similar. The translation of fedaykin that Herbert provides in Dune is "death commando"...which is a whole bucket of yikes in my opinion, but it's not entirely absurd if we're assuming that this fake word and the real word fedayeen function in the same way. A more literal translation of fedayeen is "self-sacrificer," as in willing, intentional self-sacrifice for a political cause, up to and including sacrificing your life.

If you apply this logic to Dune, it means that Villeneuve has actually shifted the meaning of this word in-universe, from fighters who are willing to sacrifice themselves for Paul to fighters who are willing to sacrifice themselves for their people. And the fedaykin are no longer a group created for Paul but a group that Paul counts himself as part of, one member among equals. Which is just WILDLY different from what's in the book. And so much better in my opinion.

[rebellum]

Not to be all "I have a degree and I know more than you" but it really bothers me how the people on tumblr who are against the word transandrophobia being coined talk about feminism because they're all just like. So wrong. It's like half the time they're doing 1970s radical feminism and half the time they're just making shit up. Like jfc read a book watch a YouTube video feminism isn't what it's your heart it refers to several theories you have to LEARN ABOUT if you've never read or listened to anything about feminism then this is what you get. People who think the patriarchy doesn't harm men, and people who think "system of oppression" just means "people in power doing things to people without power" etc. Like words have meanings. You have to learn those meanings. You aren't engaging with feminist theory, you're just making shit up. If you don't know what Foucaultian discourse is, which is part of THE basic theories of contemporary feminism, if you don't know what performativity is (no, it's not performance), then you need to learn those before you engage with the theories. Like, fuck, man, I totally get being too tired from work or too disabled or whatever to engage with learning theory, but if that's the case then you should just say "I don't know much about the theory" instead of "I know that 'intersectionality' means people have more than 1 marginalised identity because my heart says it's true". Like, we aren't just saying random shit here, established theories arise from meaningful conversation and engagement with philosophy, lived experience, and research. You can at least put a video about feminism on in the background while you fucking video game.

[cipheramnesia]

Hmm, not to detract from the absolutely wild display of racism and transphobia and general out of control bigotry directed at Imane Khelif from the radical feminism peanut gallery or nothing. But and however.

The rush in progressive spaces to attribute characteristics to her, like elevated testosterone and/or being intersex, speaks to a need for better nuance and delicacy on our end. It's complicated because we want to support intersex people against the appalling amount of institutional and general violence and disenfranchisement they experience. And knowing the way hormone levels vary from person is important in understanding how sex and gender aren't nearly as binary as most people assume. The general intentions were good, and shouldn't be discouraged. More like, just that we ought to take a minute to figure out if we know what we're talking about.

Because on the other side of the radfem peanut gallery is rushing in to assume personal information we don't know, but which we accept as contributing to her abilities and appearance. That is to say, there are unexamined racial and intersexist biases underlying the unspoken consensus that her body was somehow uniquely different that it needed to be explained by something other than "this is how people who train extensively for the sport of boxing tend to look."

That doesn't preclude her being intersex or whatnot, only that the foundation of the radfem argument rests on "this woman's appearance is deviant," in ways connecting back to racism and attitudes towards intersex bodies. And when we inadvertently buy into the foundational premise of their bigotry, we also inadvertently perpetuate the inherent bigotry in the assumption, by responding with "that deviant body of a woman of color is intersex."

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get around to here is Imane Khelif looks like a boxer. She's tall and has the kind of muscles a boxer has, regardless of hormones or being intersex or race or anything else. Being intersex comes in many shapes of bodies, the same as perisex bodies. But assuming a body must be intersex because we feel like it confirms deep rooted prejudice about what intersex bodies are is also an expression of that bias.

These things are rife with complications built on centuries of prejudice and systemic oppression, and there will never be a way to talk about it that's simple, perfectly true forever, and easy. It means sometimes we have to take a frustrating amount of time to try and unpack what's happening, and maybe even not say anything at all but probably also try to resist too many epic slams on terfs that are like inadvertently slamming our other disenfranchised groups, basically. I think. I'm not sure I did this very well either. But those undercurrents of bias affect us so like... be mindful and try to be kind.

[phantomrose96]

I've mentioned this thing in tags before but I've decided fuck it, it should be its own post.

I've seen this sentiment lumped into Eat the Rich posts which goes like "if you're worth more than $1 million I think you should die" and I think tumblr users need to know this is not the Eat the Rich statement they think it is.

Someone being worth $1 million doesn't mean what you think it means.

A 71-year-old widow who bought a single-family 2,000 sqft home in Somerville Massachusetts with her husband 40 years ago to raise their family in, who now lives in this home all alone because her children are grown and her husband is dead, is--without a shadow of a doubt--worth more than $1 million. Maybe even $1.5 or $2 million. And it's because of her home equity, because that's what single family homes go for these days in that area.

The 71-year-old widow may be living pension check to pension check, because her millionaire status can only be dipped into if she's removed from her home and sells it. And if it's the home she's loved for 40 years, where she simply wants to live out the rest of her time peacefully in, I wouldn't put her to the guillotine for that.

Maybe that comes off as an extreme example, like that's just an outlier of the "we hate millionaires" agenda. But I don't think it truly is. I'll scale back and tell you the median U.S. home price right now is about $430,000. And that's just median. Half of them are more expensive than that.

The statement "I think people should be able to afford to buy and own the homes they live in" is, I would desperately hope, not a radical statement to anyone on Tumblr. I think that's a pretty well-received idea. So someone who's done that, who's bought their home and worked many years to pay off the mortgage and now owns it fully, is worth close to half a million dollars on average. Many of them more than that, as many areas rapidly gentrify and drive up housing worth.

Statement 2: "I think people deserve to have a retirement fund which would comfortably support them through end of life." Too radical for anyone? I hope not. And I won't pretend to be an expert on how much retirement money is ideal. I'm sure it varies with cost of living in places. But considering this is money which, ideally, should support someone for the remaining 10-20 years of life (money which may be necessary to cover the absolutely crippling medical costs of end-of-life treatment) I'd bet it's well into the many hundreds of thousands. Even if someone was simply living off $30k/year of take home money and just making that work, then 15 years of retirement, costing $30k/year, plus maybe $50k+ of end-of-life medical costs... That's at least $500k.

Which is all to say, if you show me someone approaching retirement age who's "worth" $1 million dollars, my hope would be that their house is paid off and their retirement fund is comfortable. I'd be happy for them. I would want this for them.

Even that may not be true, though. Someone "worth" $1 million maybe owns a paid-off house which has rapidly appreciated to being worth $900k, and their $100k in retirement is something they're trying to stretch through end of life. Maybe someone worth $1 million owns a house which has ballooned to $1.1 million, and they're in fact $100k in debt.

And the fact that SO many Americans will never even meet this bar is significantly more appalling to me than the existence of people worth more than $1 million. "I own my home and can retire comfortably" is a bar we want every American to meet. I want more millionaires who are millionaires because they meet these criteria.

If Nana Somerville's house burns down tomorrow, she'll have lost everything. If a billionaire were to similarly lose $1 million of worth, he would not feel it. That's a fickle day at the stock market. That's Tuesday. That's the rich which desperately needs to be eaten.

[haggishlyhagging]

Sexual Politics is out of print. The Dialectic of Sex is out of print. What women have to do is come to terms with the fact that we live in a society that simply censors better than state censorship. People have got to come to terms with the power of the publishing industry and the media in controlling thought and expression. They have to understand that it is an issue of power and money and people have to be less passive in relation to books. People have to take their money which they don't have much of and they have to buy books by feminist writers. They have to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of how the book industry works. A hard-cover book like Letters from a War Zone was virtually published dead. If it's still in bookstores in two months it will be a miracle. They have to understand that everything that they hear all the time about how everything can be published in this country is a lie and that part of the social function of the publishing industry is to buy up the rights to and then obliterate certain books so that nobody can get them. They have to stop thinking that they live in the liberal dreamworld of equality where fairness has already been achieved. It hasn't been achieved. You can be equal in your heart but it doesn't make you equal in the world. I think that the refusal to understand what happens to books by women goes along with this liberal refusal to acknowledge that power is a reality and we're not the ones who have it. What I'm saying is that women have got to start facing reality. You cannot build any kind of movement for change on wishful thinking. The wishful thinking is that we already have what it is we want and what it is we need. We don't have it. Women who want to write and communicate, which in a big country is hard to do—it's getting harder for them, not easier. There isn't more access, there is less access. People have got to take the economics of the publishing industry seriously and understand that very few writers will survive who do not write according to the demands of the marketplace, by which I mean essentially the demands of turning out books that you can consume as passively as a television show. That's sort of the standard.

-Andrea Dworkin, “Dworkin on Dworkin” in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed

[morlock-holmes]

I often see people talking about how capitalism is great because it's the best way to get people what they need.

But, okay, so like in a Capitalist free market, supply and demand are always going to be somewhat divorced from need for as long as labor itself is subject to supply and demand, right?

I mean, am I crazy here? This seems inevitable to me but a lot of advocates for capitalism act like it isn't true for reasons I can't understand.

Like, I don't make much money, because I do unskilled work. Unskilled work is work where you can train the vast majority of people to be competent at the job within a few days (As opposed to, say, a neurosurgeon, who needs more than 18 hours of training shifts). This means that the supply of labor is high even relative to large demand, which means that in turn the price at which I can sell my labor is low.

What sort of makes me itch is that if I phrase things like that without any political agenda, most evangelists for capitalism will say, "Yeah, broadly you're exactly right."

Okay, but that means that if money is a signal of "need", then I have less ability to signal need than a skilled worker.

Suppose me and Jeff Bezos both get the same kind of cancer, and we both have the same odds of survivability from the same treatment. The treatment costs one million dollars.

Are we to say that the fact that I don't have one million dollars indicates that I need cancer treatment less than Jeff Bezos, who would pay without thinking?

That's a completely perverse definition of what it means to need things!

The only way to get out of that would be to advocate for a radical blank slate theory, in which every single person is equally capable of doing a high skilled job, and has consciously chosen not to do so.

This is just, like, obviously not the case. Like, at the very least you have to deal with unmedicated schizophrenics, people with learning disabilities, people getting chemotherapy or other medical treatments that make them too weak to work, and furthermore a lot of people who are the most "rah rah" for capitalism are also somehow the least inclined towards blank slate theory, and are often advocates of fairly rigid views of human potential who are happy to argue that some people are just incapable of doing skilled work.

But like... Because of how labor works Capitalism is going to be not very good at fulfilling the needs of unskilled workers, even if the market is otherwise working in a very idealized and efficient fashion, let alone the world we actually have with things like inherited wealth.

Now, I would argue that capitalism can be bad at fulfilling the needs of low-skill workers even when society is producing enough surplus that it is possible to fulfill their needs.

PS - This doesn't mean that supply and demand are entirely unmoored from human desire either, that's not what I'm arguing.

[blueskittlesart]

i get that people’s first reaction for the religious thing is often negative—being raised irish catholic i experience the same knee-jerk reaction—but that’s because we as adults are approaching the ideology from an adult perspective. we have our own associations with both religion as a concept in general, as well as the social phenomena around religion (and for this post specifically we’re talking about christianity more than anything else). kids don’t have that experience, and so while it might feel really uncomfortable to an adult listening to them speak with such a casual incorporation of it into their worldview, they truly wouldn’t see why that could be. and it’s only when it they’re older and it becomes the only point of perspective or logic for them that it’s truly a problem

EXACTLY. if you don't have a lot of experience with very young children it may be hard to conceptualize, but especially preschool-aged children are still learning LITERALLY EVERYTHING. like, I said the word "collision" when two of my kids ran into each other the other day and then had to have a like 10 minute conversation about what that word means and why I said it. Everything in the world is a new experience for them, including morality, storytelling, and social interaction. there's a specific, scientifically documented developmental stage (usually between ages 2.5-3) where they learn for the first time that they can lie. before that stage, they genuinely don't understand the concept that something can be fake, and it often takes even longer for them to understand that other people, especially adults, can lie to THEM, too. everything in their world is true unless proven otherwise, which can be a scary way for adults to hear religious concepts addressed, since among adults that kind of rhetoric very often goes hand in hand with radical beliefs or conspiracy thought. but for a child, it's just an age-appropriate way to conceptualize religion.

children of that age are also very self-centered in their thinking and largely assume that their lived experience is the same as everyone else's, and that anything outside their own little world doesn't exist. we almost all assumed as kids that our teachers lived at school. I once had a kid with lesbian parents ask me where my 'other mom' was. children I babysit for will very often be upset that I don't inherently know where things are in their house, because to them it's the most obvious thing in the world. they're still developing empathy and the ability to think from someone else's perspective doesn't exist yet. again, irt religion, when that kind of sentiment is expressed by an adult it's usually a supremacist or evangelical who believes that all other religions are inherently evil and their religion is inherently good, but that's not what it means when a kid expresses self-centered thought about their religion. it just means that they haven't yet learned that other people view the world differently.

[sabo-torao]

Small disclaimer before you head in: this whole post will be referencing the TCB translation. I know VIZ handled the exchange I'm discussing differently, but I couldn't find anyone who talked about the original version and as a result I don't really know who is closer to the original meaning. In any case, the "analysis" should still stand. Whether Dragon was commenting Sabo's firmness or admiring his resolution, Sabo's still putting on a mask, and that's the point I'm trying to break down. Enjoy!

This very specific interaction between Dragon and Sabo in chapter 1083 has always stuck out to me.

"My, you really are unshakeable."

which is an appropriate response to what Sabo said, of course. What kind of sensitive person reacts that way to the death of an innocent, right?

Even so, I can't help but compare the thing Sabo said to his actual, genuine reaction to King Kobra's death.

He's devastated.

Sabo brokenly screams Kobra's name, and his expression is one of full despair; he never thought about killing Kobra, let alone letting him die. On the contrary, he actively tried to save him.

Kobra told him to just let him go, that he was dead weight and he shouldn't be concerned about him, but Sabo straight up refused. In fact, Kobra's actions read way more as a sacrifice than an inevitable death; the king let himself die, knowing that this way Sabo could flee and reach Vivi and Luffy safely.

On the Lulusian ship, we see Sabo think about Kobra's last words to him and actively trying not to cry (and failing).

That's not an unshakable man. He's suffering, he's grieving. He realizes he failed his very own mission of saving the king and lets the meaning behind Kobra's actions and words sink in.

It really puts his former reaction into perspective.

Sabo's firmness, seriousness and coldness in front of Dragon and Ivankov are nothing but a façade. He acknowledges that what he's about to say might come off as harsh, and that, even if he does feel sorry for Kobra, the tragedy doesn't weigh him down thanks to the results it brought, but it all sounds like he's reassuring himself more than actually showing his indifference.

Hell, he even drinks his glass of wine right after having said that "he doesn't really care". How can anyone take his words seriously?

And we've been knowing Sabo is inclined to do this sort of thing since Dressrosa; he acted all cool and composed in front of Luffy but the second Koala called him on the Den Den Mushi he was weeping, having a hard time believing that his little brother didn't punch him or hate him for being alive all along. He even denied he was crying!

All because Sabo hates being seen as vulnerable, especially in front of the people he thinks he has to be strong for (Luffy, Dragon, etc). It's something I think goes back to how his parents treated him, since they scolded him for, y'know, having emotions and being a normal kid in need of love, but i digress.

I once saw someone describing Sabo as a very cold person in comparison to his brothers, even going as far as to say that Sabo doesn't care if people die if it means achieving the Revolutionary Army's goals (using this very interaction as proof), which couldn't be further away from the truth.

Bonney even says outright that it's weird seeing a "radical revolutionary" act so friendly when Sabo helps her out. Why would he do this if all he ever did was for "The Cause"?

Yes, Sabo is ruthless, rude, violent at times, and his friendly demeanor could be seen as a little more volatile than that of his brothers', but he's not heartless. He's not a "meanings to an end" guy, he proves it time and time and time again, and it's disheartening seeing people label him as such.

Sabo is kind. He may not be as warm as Ace and Luffy, but he is fundamentally a good person. A generous, kind, caring, sensitive person.

No matter how hard he tries to hide it.